Bugsy Siegel’s life of crime

Bugsy Siegel: The Dark Side of the American Dream. By Michael Shnayerson. Yale University Press; 248 pages; $26 and £16.99

ONE MORNING in the early 1940s Sandra Lansky discovered a pair of monsters. Their faces were shrouded; one had strapped his cheeks and chin with elastic. Sandra, who was six, screamed in terror. She did not recognise her father’s friends, Esther and Ben, in sleeping masks and the latest anti-wrinkle technology. They weren’t monsters. At least, Esther wasn’t.

Ben Siegel is another story. He was better known (though never to his face) as Bugsy. Born in 1906, he got his start in what was then the teeming shtetl of New York’s Lower East Side. Tough, shrewd, handsome and fearless, he became—along with Sandra Lansky’s father, Meyer—one of the 20th century’s pre-eminent Jewish-American gangsters. But while Lansky was relatively mild in temperament and content to conduct his affairs discreetly, Siegel was an impresario with a violent temper. In the view of Michael Shnayerson, author of this pacey and thoughtful biography, “Siegel himself killed roughly a dozen men; according to one gangster, he oversaw the contract killings of far more.” 

This book is part of Yale University Press’s excellent Jewish Lives series; Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man, and Irving Berlin...